Richard Chamberlain
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What’s happiness in Hamlet?
in The Renaissance of emotion
Chapter DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7765/9780719098956.00014
Online Publication Date:
01 Aug 2015
Abstract only
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Hamlet is best known for its exploration of melancholy, yet it can also be read as a meditation on the good life, as negative reflection upon utopia. The play’s account of suffering bears upon the nature of happiness, even if the latter is largely absent. Rephrasing Dover Wilson’s famous question about the play, this chapter explores Hamlet’s preoccupation with the relationship between event, chance, and emotion. Through a close examination of Shakespeare’s use of the terms hap, perhaps, and happy, it argues that Hamlet imagines happiness as serendipity, or the evasion of conventional moral goods and totalising social systems. In the early modern period the primary meaning of happy was not a feeling of pleasure, but rather, ‘Having good “hap” or fortune; lucky, fortunate; favoured by lot, position, or other external circumstance’ (OED, 2a). By examining the play’s exploration of this notion, the chapter sees Hamlet’s study of political repression as part of a broader thesis: that happiness lies in hap (suddenness, spontaneity, chance) rather than bureaucratic prescription. The conditions for this kind of utopian freedom, however, are difficult to achieve, and the play’s tragic sting can be read in this light.
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The Renaissance of emotion

Understanding affect in Shakespeare and his contemporaries

eISBN:
9780719098956
Publisher:
Manchester University Press
Cover The Renaissance of emotion
Subjects:
Literature and Theatre
Keywords:
Emotion; Passion; Affect; Shakespeare; Early Modern; Renaissance; Embodiment
Page Count:
290
Publisher:
Manchester University Press

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Cover Hartly House, Calcutta

Hartly House, Calcutta

Phebe Gibbes

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
13 Feb 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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This novel is a designedly political document. Written at the time of the Hastings impeachment and set in the period of Hastings’s Orientalist government, Hartly House, Calcutta (1789) represents a dramatic delineation of the Anglo-Indian encounter. The novel constitutes a significant intervention in the contemporary debate concerning the nature of Hastings’s rule of India by demonstrating that it was characterised by an atmosphere of intellectual sympathy and racial tolerance. Within a few decades the Evangelical and Anglicising lobbies frequently condemned Brahmans as devious beneficiaries of a parasitic priestcraft, but Phebe Gibbes’s portrayal of Sophia’s Brahman and the religion he espouses represent a perception of India dignified by a sympathetic and tolerant attempt to dispel prejudice.
Cover Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Crossing borders and queering citizenship

Civic reading practice in contemporary American and Canadian writing

Author:
Zalfa Feghali

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
16 Apr 2019
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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Can reading make us better citizens? This book sheds light on how the act of reading can be mobilised as a powerful civic tool in service of contemporary civil and political struggles for minority recognition, rights, and representation in North America. Crossing borders and queering citizenship reimagines the contours of contemporary citizenship by connecting queer and citizenship theories to the idea of an engaged reading subject. This book offers a new approach to studying the act of reading, theorises reading as an integral element of the basic unit of the state: the citizen. By theorising the act of reading across borders as a civic act that queers citizenship, the book advances an alternative model of belonging through civic readerly engagement. Exploring work by seven US, Mexican, Canadian, and Indigenous authors, including Gloria Anzaldúa, Dorothy Allison, Gregory Scofield, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Erín Moure, Junot Díaz, and Yann Martel, the book offers sensitive interpretations of how reading can create citizenship practices that foreground and value recognition, rights, and representation for all members of a political system.
Cover Howard Jacobson

Howard Jacobson

Author:
David Brauner

Book

Publication History:

Online Publication Date:
12 Jan 2021
Subjects:
  1. Literature and Theatre
Available In:
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This is a comprehensive and definitive study of the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson. It offers lucid, detailed and nuanced readings of each of Jacobson’s novels, and makes a powerful case for the importance of his work in the landscape of contemporary fiction. Focusing on the themes of comedy, masculinity and Jewishness, the book emphasises the richness and diversity of Jacobson’s work. Often described by others as ‘the English Philip Roth’ and by himself as ‘the Jewish Jane Austen’, Jacobson emerges here as a complex and often contradictory figure: a fearless novelist; a combative public intellectual; a polemical journalist; an unapologetic elitist and an irreverent outsider; an exuberant iconoclast and a sombre satirist. Never afraid of controversy, Jacobson tends to polarise readers; but, love him or hate him, he is difficult to ignore. This book gives him the thorough consideration and the balanced evaluation that he deserves.